Rumor of the Day: Is Disney making an animated Marvel movie?

Mon, Apr 09, 2012 12:08pm

When Disney and Marvel got in bed together a few years back, fans were both worried and jazzed: worried that Disney would mousify the comics they love and jazzed at the new possibilities of the House That Stan Lee Built partnering with the animation powerhouse. The former never came to pass, but is the latter actually coming true?

It takes a certain interpretive reading of a few blog posts on the Blue Sky Disney blog, which reports on the various nooks and crannies of Disney's animation business, but if you choose to read these tea leaves the right way, it could signify some good geek news.

First came a post last year with this curious bit tucked away, about a new film by Winnie the Pooh co-director Don Hall:

That project, once announced will generate a lot of buzz in certain geek communities, as it's going to surprise a lot of people for what it is and what it's not. But it's in the very early embryonic stage and it depends on how well the project is received upon the presentation that is being prepared for John [Lasster] and Ed [Catmull].

Lassiter, as you know, runs Pixar, and, given their monstrous creative and financial success, holds the reins on Disney's animated movies. Flash forward to earlier this month, when a post popped up with this:

[One of] the projects competing for 2014/2015 [is] the uber-secret film from Don Hall, which will be a marvelously unexpected project if it ever gets the green light...

Hmmm. A "marvelously unexpected" movie that will "generate a lot of buzz in certain geek communities." Word choice is rarely accidental, now is it? But, more to the point ... if Disney were going to make a Marvel animated movie, what would it be (given that so many of its heavy hitters—like Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Avengers—are tied up at other studios)?

It's been a while since we've heard anything about Ant-Man, hasn't it?